A place for some seriously wild ruminations

When Trust Collapses

It has become common practice to label candidates from opposing parties as liars. Though the designation may be true, it loses its force as we writers employ it repeatedly and as the partisans in the political theater insert it into their scripts repeatedly.

I, too, am guilty.

So what is one to do? Say it in a fresh, meaningful way remains our only recourse.

On Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey announced the findings of his bureau’s investigation into then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of her own server to send and receive State Department communications, including messages deemed classified, i.e., designated as owning a level of security beyond the normal, such as “Top Secret”.

Comey stated the investigation did not find evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton when she exposed classified material to public scrutiny, including the scrutiny of our enemies.

The FBI director did find that Hillary Clinton was careless and reckless in the way she set up and used her private email account for the nation’s secret business. He also noted that her legal hirelings scrubbed the server so thoroughly that neither the FBI nor the State Department was able to recover all her government emails, emails that do not belong to her but that belong to we, the people, through our elected representatives and their agents. Further, Comey observed that Hillary Clinton, shall we say, uttered several falsehoods.

That means she either asserted the existence of something that did not exist, or she asserted the nonexistence of something that did exist.

I won’t belabor the outcry that she should be prosecuted for her actions. As a foreign policy buff, I am shocked by her attitude and her actions, but it seems pointless to dwell on the legality or criminality of them. We need to determine the damage and remedy it. We need to ask ourselves why such a person is running for the highest office in the land.

As voters, we must ask ourselves the significance of her utterance of falsehoods, falsehoods she repeated often in the same or modified form.

The first falsehood we will examine is when Hillary Clinton claimed that she turned over all her State Department emails to both State and to the FBI. Comey said that was false, that, in fact, they still have not all been turned over, in part because not all were recovered, and they likely never will.

A second falsehood is her coy deflection of what it meant to “wipe” a server, asking reporters what they meant, like “with a cloth”. Not only was her expression utterly disingenuous and a spitting on the intelligence of American citizens, a sign that she knew exactly what she had been doing, but she did, in fact, have her server wiped.

A third falsehood: no classified material ever made it to her server. She neither sent nor received classified material at her private email account. The falsehood of this claim was established early on, so she mutated her claim to say that she did not send or receive material that was labeled classified from her private email account.

That mutation became a fourth falsehood. Comey made it clear that at least some of the emails, and he pointedly remarked both emails that originated with her and emails that were sent to her, were labeled classified, including those with the highest confidentiality rating.

Yet a fifth falsehood is Hillary Clinton’s claim that she only used one device to access her private email server onto which she hijacked the nation’s business. Comey stated she used multiple devices, which opens up greater theft of secrets for our enemies’ hackers.

Which brings us to a sixth falsehood: the private email server was not exposed to hackers. Comey said there was evidence that hackers attempted and may have succeeded in breaking into her vulnerable, private servers, or that they accessed email contents from the recipients’ end, the unsecured accounts of those persons to whom she sent her emails.

We could go further and address other utterances of falsehood she directed to American intellects, such as her stated reasoning for using a private email server: her convenience so she could access both work and private emails. Knowing that her government emails were subject to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, why would she or anyone else want to place their truly private emails on the same server, much less the same account, and risk having them exposed to the public?

She wouldn’t. The ONLY reason she would, would be to have the ability to destroy her government emails. In other words, hiding the public’s business from the public so that the public would not know what she had been doing or saying. She was using the private email as a cover to control access to her performance as a public servant.

So what should we call Hillary Clinton? What noun or adjective adequately describes her native propensity to prevaricate? How does any voter place his or her trust in Hillary Clinton?

Both Adolf Hitler and one of his lieutenants, Joseph Goebbels, said essentially the same thing: “The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.”

Now, I won’t use any extreme rhetoric, so be clear that I am not comparing Hillary Clinton to Adolf Hitler or Joesph Goebbels in terms of their Nazi program, their slaughter, their fascism, their cruelty, etc. However, a comparison is to be made in regard to a tool that both have chosen to employ: big lies. Where does it stop for Hillary Clinton?

She won’t release transcripts of her richly compensated speeches to the Wall Street financial barons, not a lie, but clearly she wants you, and especially the average working man and woman, to stay in the dark about what she told them. She claimed she came under fire in Bosnia, a falsehood that she manufactured to be held in higher esteem. She uttered a falsehood to explain why our ambassador to Algeria and three other Americans were killed at Benghazi, an anti-Muslim film produced by an obscure filmmaker, then repeated that falsehood to the relatives of the victims. She then called the relatives of the victims liars when they revealed what she had told them, though they had documented her words. She placed what she thought were Muslim sentiments over those of her fellow countrymen!

Yet Hillary Clinton has the gall to point at Donald Trump and to accuse him of bigotry and racism because he wants to enforce our nation’s lawfully enacted immigration laws and national security protocols.

Does Hillary Clinton really believe in anything she says or does, or are they just covers for what appears to be nothing more than a program of self-entitlement and self-enrichment?

Donald Trump is far from a perfect candidate. In fact, the whole field, both Democrat and Republican, represented the best our country had to offer at this point in history, yet most fell far, far short of evincing any sort of genuine love for fellow Americans, and love of country and service to it, as well as qualifications to govern it. More than ever, we can discern the biases, the narrow and mulish viewpoints, the manipulations of special interests, and the “principles” used to provide cover for those special interests, and the selfishness with which these professional officeholders approach their “public service”.

Whatever a voter’s ideology is, can he or she abide someone like a Hillary Clinton, who of her own choice tramples on the truth?

Ask yourself: Is Hillary Clinton trustworthy? If the answer is “no”, you know for whom to vote. If the answer is “yes”, you need to ask yourself two questions: how many falsehoods does she get to utter to your face before she loses your trust; and are you enabling Hillary Clinton’s falsehoods by avoiding their significance?